Follow the journey of the artist Henry Mosler as he trekked through Kentucky during the American Civil War as a correspondent for Harper's Weekly.

Word Cloud of Mosler's Diary

Henry Mosler's daily entries of marching through Kentucky form the
core of his Civil War Diary. In total, the diary is composed of roughly 4,700
words; 3,445 of which focus on the narrative of his time with the army troops. The
frequency with which he used certain words is registered here in this “word
cloud” graphic.

Words that Mosler used more often appear more prominently in
the chart. Following the conventions of diarists, he oriented himself (and
his readers) in time and space by recording the date, time of day, and place
name. It follows then that words like night
and day and evening and morning are
larger. What other words emerge? Notice how the words march, miles, skirmish, and
camp display on the screen. These
are the action verbs and nouns that dominated Mosler’s days; it makes sense
that they dominate the graphic.

By paying close attention to Mosler’s writing, we can learn more
about him as a person. As we prepared the transcript of the diary, we puzzled
over his sentence constructions, spelling, punctuation, and word choices. One Archives of American Art staff
member observed, “It is as though he was thinking in German and writing in
English.” For example, we noticed how
often he capitalized nouns. Indeed, English was not Mosler’s first language. In other passages in the diary, Mosler wrote
in German. And, he himself was interested in language and speech. On October
19, when Mosler encountered a woman along his journey, he mimicked her local
vernacular accent and vocabulary, observing that she expressed herself in “the
language of the mountain regions.”

Mosler’s use of language in the diary supplements and extends
the illustrations he prepared for Harper’s
Weekly during the Civil War. Would you like to experiment with a "word cloud" of the diary? Help yourself to a word-processed version of the transcript. We used Wordle to create ours.